Movies for the whole family in a small box

Sunday

Nov 4, 2012 at 6:00 AM

Bob and Joy Schwabach ON COMPUTERS

Instead of fighting over the family iPad on long car trips and plane rides, three people can watch their own movie or TV show on their own tablet, computer or phone, all streamed from a little Seagate box that can hold 300 high definition movies.

We are sort of fascinated by this. The box is called the GoFlex Satellite, and it has 500 gigabytes of storage and its own wireless transmitter. It works like magic: The range is about 150 feet, so the kids can be in the back row of the plane, watching movies on their own devices, while Mom and Dad are in first class, beaming the video from the wallet-sized GoFlex in Mom’s purse. And more than just by the way, the gadget requires no Internet connection.

Storing movies on the drive is a snap. Use drag and drop for folders or files, or use the free Media Sync software that you can download from Seagate.com. With Media Sync, all photos, documents, and videos move over to the drive in seconds automatically. (It felt instantaneous to us.) Unplug the GoFlex drive and fire away; it will beam your stuff to any iPad, smartphone, Android tablet or computer tuned to the GoFlex network.

Tuning to the GoFlex network means going into the WiFi settings of your tablet, computer or phone and selecting it from a list. Next, open a browser (Safari, Firefox, Google, Internet Explorer or whatever) and you’ll immediately be routed to a GoFlex Web address with a list of your movies, music, photos and documents neatly arranged in folders.

Working example: Joy wanted to watch a video taken by her brother, but the movie wasn’t in the right format for the iPad. So she used a free program, Freemake Video Converter from Freemake.com, to convert it. She dragged the icon for the movie onto a picture of an apple and that made it iPad-compatible.

The GoFlex Satellite first came out a year ago, but it’s recently received a nice software update. The battery life is now seven hours instead of five, and it has 25 hours on standby. (It comes with a car charger and wall adapter.) Before the update, you couldn’t use the Internet and watch a movie simultaneously. Now you can switch from your movie to your email or Web, if another Wi-Fi signal is present. Up to eight people can access music, photos and documents from the GoFlex at the same time, but you’re still limited to three movie watchers at one time; they can all watch the same or different movies.

The GoFlex drive comes with several free movies from the Discover Channel and the Peach Open Studio Project. We recommend “Big Buck Bunny.” It works with PCs or Macs, but the Mac has to be running a Windows emulator. List price is $200 at Seagate.com.

When we were in Laguna Beach, Calif., about 12 years ago, we stumbled upon a Dr. Seuss collection in a fine art gallery. Bob said they were just selling inkjet prints. But “no,” said the saleman, “it’s a giclee.”

Giclee is French, the verb form means to squirt, which is what inkjet printers do. (They put it in French to spray the buyers.) So we can giclee a lot of copies of any print, but if you want it on canvas and wide, the inkjet printer that can do that costs about $5,000.

That was the price for a Hewlett Packard inkjet printer we first saw in Pasadena a dozen years ago. You could print on paper or canvas and go about 4 feet wide. The prints’ quality was terrific and looked as good as the originals to us. The price was attractive. For the same money you could open your own art gallery and tell people the paintings on the walls weren’t copies, they were giclee.

This is not just fantasy. An artist named Wade Guyton is getting a big rep from using an inkjet to print giant canvases. His work is on display at the Whitney Museum in New York and part of the permanent collection at MOMA (New York’s Museum of Modern Art). Guyton says he sometimes rips something out of a book and scans it, then prints it out large. He says he’s always thought learning to draw was too much work. He uses an Epson Stylus Pro 11880, a $10,000 printer, to print his floor-to-ceiling canvases. (We wonder if anyone else could do this too.)

Epson is into this art print business pretty heavy now: They have Signature Worthy canvases that come in gloss, satin and matte finish, and claim to be of gallery quality. They come in widths from 13 to 44 inches, but in December, they’ll come out with 5-foot-wide rolls and large cut sheets.

NationalGeographic.com sells a $200 DNA-testing kit. It lets you learn about the migration path of your ancestors, find out if you have Neanderthal or Denisovan ancestry, and share your story with other participants.

Ancestry.com also sells DNA testing. As their promo says, find out if you’re part Scandinavian, West African or Native American. Meet a third cousin for the first time. DNA.Ancestry.com combines 34 million family trees and 10 billion records from their parent site to dig deep. It’s $99 if you’re already a member of Ancestry.com, which costs $23 a month or $78 for six months. Put your name on the waiting list; they say it may take awhile because of high demand.

Why watch the TV show when you can solve your local neighborhood crimes with your own forensic analysis?

“The Illustrated Guide to Home Forensic Science Experiments,” by Thompson and Thompson, $30 from Makezine.com, teaches you how to discover and lift fingerprints that are invisible to the naked eye, distinguish a person’s physical characteristics from examining a single hair, and — the ultimate — examining and comparing DNA. (Gotcha!)